In operations of the power saving optimization in application software running on multitasking operating systems (OS) or in software used in embedded systems utilizing multitasking operating systems, the steps of loading, onto target hardware, executable objects resulting from the compiling and linking of the program sources, making the software and hardware actually run, and reducing the measured power consumption are carried out. Similar steps are also carried out in operations of optimizing the processing performance of embedded systems. Consequently, in order to perform the optimization of software, operators or designers of embedded systems have needed to write the program, debug it, and load it onto the target so as to measure the power consumption and the processing performance, all of which required effort and time.
As a conventional technique of optimizing the power consumption of calculators or the like as described above, Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2005-63066 discloses a distributed computing system such as a grid computing system in which a computation processing unit is selected to perform partial computation on the basis of information on the power required for the partial computation, the importance of the partial computation, etc., in order to reduce the power consumption.
As another conventional technique related to the reduction in the power consumption of electric devices, Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2006-72991 discloses a technique of conducting appropriate mode switching taking into consideration of the power consumed by migration processing and return processing for switching between operation modes in order to solve the problem that when, for example, an electric device has to return immediately to the normal mode when the switching to the power-saving mode is being conducted, the time period in which the device operates in the power-saving mode is too short so that the switching to the power-saving mode actually increases the power consumption.